Data is everywhere. We generate data every day just by using our devices and digital platforms. In this age, we are using the Internet to perform almost all tasks in our life, from time management, shopping, food ordering, communicating with our friends, booking appointments with our doctor, or even a hairdresser. After Covid 19 pandemic has forced us to spend even more time indoors and with that automatically forced us to spend more time online, we started generating even more data than ever before. This data creates our unique digital fingerprint.
All of this data is being collected by different businesses and organizations in order for them to create your unique user profile so they can offer better and more personalized service. They use it to make business decisions, organize their marketing strategy, prevent fraud, and much more.
But – having a lot of data doesn’t mean you will have correct or useful data. Remember, in most cases quantity doesn’t beat the quality. This is why businesses and organizations use a process called data enrichment.
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What is Data Enrichment?
Data enrichment according to SEON is a process that takes raw data points and merges them with similar data points in a larger database. This process of taking raw data and refining it in useful information consists of data profiling, removing errors like duplicates or nulls, and adding additional geographic, demographic and behavioral details. What that actually means is that combining simple data from multiple sources, it enriches their existing information and creates a comprehensive profile. Data enrichment is needed because the information businesses or organizations can get by themselves can be inaccurate, outdated or have some gaps which will result in those companies not being able to stay competitive. By combining internal and external data, it is easier to know who your customer is and what they want in order to offer them proper service.
Even though it might be the first time you hear about data enrichment, this is actually not a new process. We are usually experiencing examples of automated data enrichment on an everyday basis; it is just that most people are not aware of it. Google’s autofill feature is one of the most familiar automated data enrichment processes, and almost all of us will use it at least once per day. Even your email providers are using data enrichment to help with predictive text.
How can it help with user verification?
With our growing presence on the Internet, we are opening ourselves to more opportunities for cyber-attacks. Last year the UN warned us that cybercrime is up 600% due to the COVID-19 pandemic and our increased dependence on the Internet. Even though most businesses and organizations are using data enrichment procedures to improve their marketing and generate sales, it can be used for much more. If used correctly it can be an amazing tool to fight against cyber frauds as it can stop attacks in the root, before they cause any damage to the customer and business.
As it has collected details about customers from several sources it can recognize when there is something different in the user browser fingerprinting. By doing this it can stop most of the spoofing attacks before they even happen. For example, if the user is signing up with an email address, comparing it with the internal and external databases can reveal whether it was involved with any previous data breaches. In a similar way, we can also use the IP address of your user. Quick comparison of the IP address with the databases can confirm if the IP is on spam blacklist or if they are using TOR, VPNs or proxies.
The primary duty of all businesses and organizations should be fraud protection as your customers’ return business depends on the trust they have in your ability to protect their data. Even though data enrichment is a great tool in your fraud prevention tactics, it should be used with different elements in order to maximize your protection. Recent research showed that nearly 80% of senior IT employees and security leaders believe their companies lack sufficient protection against cyber-attacks despite increased IT security investments made in 2020. That shows us how educating yourself and your employees about the dangers of cyberattacks and how to react and defend against them should be of utmost importance for every business or organization.